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So one of the Linux distros that I used a lot in my early days was Puppy Linux. Around the time I started with it, Puppy had two graphical text editors, Leafpad and Beaver. Leafpad was basically what you'd get if you were copying Notepad's interface using Gtk+. It's extremely simple and no frills. Even after moving away from Puppy, I continued to install Leafpad on whatever system I was on and made sure that it was the program used to open any text file when clicked on in a file manager. I did this for a rather long time, until I sat down and actually learned Vim.
Xfce at some point adopted the Leafpad codebase and began improving upon it as their Mousepad editor. Mousepad initially only added tabs, and then syntax highlighting. And then, after a while, a funny thing happened. The number of things that you can configure on Mousepad blew up, and it stopped being in any way reminiscent of Leafpad and started looking like a mini Gedit. It's pretty nice, if that's your thing, but to me it's gone way beyond what I think that sort of program should be. Funny that I have an opinion on graphical text editors considering I use Vim almost exclusively, but there it is.
Anyway, Vapad 0.1.0 is out. My plan with Vapad is to take the essence of what Leafpad was and say, what would this be if it were made today? Well, not having tabs is just silly, and I'm not sure that there's ever a time when you *don't* want syntax highlighting on, so the editor is going to set up some sane defaults for you, let you change just a couple of things like fonts and colors, and use a more modern interface. That is, instead of a menu bar you get a GtkHeaderbar with an open and save button in it and a hamburger menu. It fits right in on Gnome and doesn't look too out of place in Xfce. There's no setup to be done to get it working the way that you want it to. You just open files and edit them, and the program should stay out of the way.
Opening, editing and saving files
Basic search forward and backward with wrapping on by default
Tabbed interface
Keyboard shortcuts for all currently implemented actions
Advanced search, including search and replace and regex
The preferences window doesn't exist yet. When it does, it'll be short and sweet (see below).
When opening files, the chooser should be set to the directory containing the current file. Easy fix, probably next.
I plan to add any previous searches to the completions for the search bar.
Printing
Tab location
Font
Color scheme
What I don't plan to have is a million little checkboxes to tun features like line numbering, syntax highlighting and auto-indenting on or off. My thinking is that those kinds of comfor features can just be left on at all times, because the first thing that most people do is turn them on anyway. Like I said, sane defaults and a simple interface.
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